The Same Page as Your Three Competitors

What has changed since the autumn

A few months ago using one of these tools was unusual enough to be a topic of conversation.

It is now widespread, which means your competitors are drafting pages the same way you might be.

Since the tool produces the most probable version of any given page, those pages converge.

Which changes the competitive question from whether to use it to what happens when everybody does.

What convergence looks like

• The same sections in the same order.
• The same headings.
• The same list of benefits.
• The same reassuring phrases.
• The same absence of prices and specifics.

The last is the important one. What these pages have in common is not just their wording but what they leave out, and what they leave out is everything a customer is actually trying to find.

Check it yourself

Since this is easy to verify and more convincing than being told.

Open the same service page on four competitor sites and read them side by side.

Note how many say something you could not have guessed from the page title.

Then note how many state a price, a timescale, a limit, or a specific example.

The gap between those two counts is the opportunity, and it is usually large.

Do it for your own page too, which is the uncomfortable part.

The advantage moved rather than disappearing

Which is the useful way to think about this.

Competent general writing used to be a real differentiator, because producing it took skill or money.

It is now available to everybody at no cost, so it differentiates nobody.

What cannot be produced that way is your figures, your photographs, your named examples, your limits, and your opinions.

Those were always more persuasive and are now also scarcer relative to everything around them.

So the same content that was worth having is worth more, which is an unusual position to be in.

A worked example

A business compared their service page against three local competitors and found all four covered the same eight points in roughly the same order.

None of the four stated a price, a lead time, or what they would not do.

They rewrote theirs around four things: a price range with what moves it, a typical timescale, two jobs described specifically with photographs, and a paragraph on what they do not take on.

The page was shorter than before.

Enquiries from it rose and, more usefully, the enquiries were better qualified, since people arrived knowing roughly what it would cost.

The competitors' pages have not changed since, which is the part worth noticing.

The specifics that are hardest to copy

Worth listing, since these are the assets now.

Prices and ranges, with what moves them.

Photographs of your own work, dated and located.

Named examples, with figures, of jobs you have done.

What you refuse, and why, which is unusually persuasive.

Your own judgement where the trade disagrees, stated plainly.

And numbers from your own operation: how long, how many, how often.

None of those can be produced by any tool, by you or by anybody else, which is precisely what makes them worth having.

Search is not the whole audience

Worth remembering, since this discussion is usually framed as a search question.

A customer comparing three quotes reads all three sites carefully, and that is a decision worth thousands rather than a click.

At that moment, the site that says something specific wins against two that say the same competent nothing.

So the value of being distinctive shows up in conversion rather than only in ranking.

Which matters for a small business, since you can influence conversion directly and ranking only partly.

It also arrives faster, since a page change affects the next person who reads it rather than taking months to register anywhere.

Use it for what everybody else is not

The practical application of all this.

Use the tool for the parts nobody differentiates on: structure, tidying, alternative headings, checking whether you have missed a question.

Spend the time saved on the parts that cannot be produced that way: getting the prices onto the page, taking the photographs, writing the examples.

That is the arbitrage available at the moment, and it is available to everybody and taken by very few.

The businesses that will be visible in a year are the ones adding specifics rather than the ones adding volume.

Nobody can check whether you wrote it

Worth addressing, since the anxiety about detection distracts from the real question.

Tools claiming to identify machine-written text are unreliable in both directions, and no search engine has said that using these tools is itself a problem.

What has been said, repeatedly, is that thin, unhelpful pages produced at scale are the problem, which was true before any of this existed.

So the question to ask about a page is not how it was written but whether somebody reading it learns something they could not get elsewhere.

That test is the same one that has applied for years, and it is the one worth spending your worry on.

The counter-case

Convergence is not new.

Sites in a trade looked similar long before any of this, because they were built from the same templates by the same suppliers with the same advice.

Being competent and similar also beats being distinctive and bad, and a business with nothing specific to say is not helped by being told to say something specific.

And plenty of customers do not read carefully enough for any of this to matter, particularly on smaller jobs where the decision is made on price alone.

Read four competitor pages side by side, count the specifics, and add the ones nobody else has.

What to do

1. Open four competitor pages together.
2. Count what is specific on each.
3. Do the same for yours.
4. Add a price range and what moves it.
5. Add a timescale.
6. Add what you refuse.
7. Use the tool for the rest.

Step six is the one nobody does and the one that most reliably separates a page, since stating what you will not take on is impossible to produce generically and immediately credible.

Why the output converges is covered in why the result reads like everybody else's.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.